I’m very excited to tell you that the first week of #HealthyAndy went surprisingly well. If I’m dedicated to the cause, I can apply myself and in turn, surprise myself with my results.
I spent the week eating healthy food, and eating really well, according to a fairly strict eating plan where I averaged eating about 1200-1600 calories per day – thanks to My Fitness Pal and Fitbit, it is super easy to keep an eye on what you’re eating. I’m not a fan of ‘calorie counting’ per say, but I plan on doing it just in the beginning so that I can get my mind around what a portion is and how easy it is to take in more calories than what I should in order to lose weight.
I have also exercised every day except Sunday which was my rest day. I alternated resistance and plyo training with fast walks, to ensure that I was getting my heart rate up into cardio and fat burning zones every day.
The big win here? I didn’t cheat once! This is a huge thing for me, because I am a sugar addict and feel the need to eat all the sugar, all the time.
Now, I was feeling super strong throughout the week, but as the week came to a close I started getting the characteristic sugar headaches and sugar cravings.
Example! This weekend, Ross and I were discussing Christmas prezzies and what I’d like, so I told him he could get me a nice new handbag perhaps.. But then we went out shopping, and that all changed. It went from me telling Ross to get me a new handbag, to me telling him to just get me all my favourite sweets (as I walked past sweet aisles, and stood in the queue at shops such as Dischem). I want liquorice (liquorice coins, the light brown liquorice, drop lacricz, herringe, and the ones that look like chalk – OMG all the freaking liquorice), I want Fruit Pastilles, I want Jaffa Cakes, I want nougat, I want seashell chocolates, I want Marvellous Creations chocolates with the popping candy, I want Haribo sweets (especially the Schnuller ones), I want a box of Woolworths chewy sweets, I want sour worms, I want lebkuchen. I WANT IT ALL GUYS. ALL.
So yes, admittedly, based on the above paragraph, this week is going to be a rough one.
What I can say, however, is that I lost 1.6kg in the last week! I’m feeling good, I’m feeling healthy and I’m feeling strong. Let’s hit up this next week with a bang!
“I’m not a fan of ‘calorie counting’ per say, but I plan on doing it just in the beginning so that I can get my mind around what a portion is and how easy it is to take in more calories than what I should …”
This, once I had spent a few months of restricting my calorie intake, I had a much better idea of where, and how I could easily blow my calorie count away. I stopped counting calories and relied on what had become an ingrained awareness of what I ate. I rarely check nutritional information, mainly when really uncertain.
Apart from that, I weigh myself 2 to 3 times a week as it is a great information source once one is over the unnecessary fear of the scale. It’s finally given me a sense of control over my weight, I don’t always exercise that control, but I never feel lost as to why my weight is changing, whether for better, or worse.
That’s awesome.
I dread the scale so for now so I’ll avoid regular weighings – I find that if I’ve put on weight, I’m more inclined to emotionally eat and it all spirals out of control from there.
Yup, that was my exact reason for avoiding regular weighing originally. A poor morning result would be a day of binging.
This will sound cheesy, but I started thinking of it as a useful statistic to track closely, as one would if one were playing a computer game, or caring for a patient.
It also means that I know my normal day-to-day weight fluctuations, so I don’t get bothered by an abnormal high, or celebrate an abnormal low.
(Ladies have the _worst_ luck there, that period bloat. It would have taken me longer to adjust had that variable been present.)